These three reports of the Geneva-based RIBios group on biosafety research and
capacity building (Réseau
interdisciplinaire biosécurité) illustrate how a
fact-finding
mission in developing countries can shed light on
the capacity building process in a way that provides information on
field activities which is lacking in most of the publicly available
documents on this topic. They show, through the observations of
the analyst, where some of the basic obstacles and difficulties lie,
and what might be done about them. As might be expected, this is a
very slow
process in those countries where the most fundamental skills and infrastructures are
often lacking, such as literacy and electricity, not to mention
computers and the capacity to use them.
This is especially serious in the implementation of
biosafety-related processes because
computers represent the backbone of the
Biosafety
Clearing-House's functioning (Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety,
see especially
Article 20: Information Sharing and the Biosafety
Clearing-House). The Senegal report (in French) is particularly
interesting with regard to the problems caused by the huge
discrepancies between industrialized and developing countries'
information management capacities. Last but not least, as pointed
out in the latter, access to information is often a big
problem, which is worsened where the use of information is part of an
abusive power relationship.
